Posted: Sun 15 Jan 2012, 22:37 Post_subject:
SOPA Protests - large parts of the Internet to be shutdownSub_title: [Hopefully] Wednesday 18th January is shutdown day

What will you be doing Wednesday 18th January 2012?
Personally, I'm going to be joining millions of others shutting off my computer
A mass switch off/shutdown has been organised by Reddit-ers, and I've just seen support from Raspberry Pi and many games sites are also 'going dark', with wikipedia still rumoured to shutdown

The US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency has faced criticism for perceived overreach in targeting websites, like TVShack, with no direct US link.

In July the agency's assistant deputy director told the Guardian that ICE would now actively pursue websites similar to TVShack even if their only connection to the US was a website address ending in .com or .net.

Such suffixes are routed through Verisign, an internet infrastructure company based in Virginia, which the agency believes is sufficient to seek a US prosecution

Expect more from other countries....boundary?, what boundary?, they say....

Is there sufficient awareness as to the effect of this passed legislation?

To be honest, I'm quite astounded that far more people and powerful groups aren't publicising this....??

Not to worry, Aitch. American Government is becoming Anti-American in both parties.

Want some real foolishness? The Corporates are going to make a spectacle out of planting a wreath at the Martin Luther King Jr. monument on Monday, which is officially MLK day because we have a Monday Holiday law. His birthday is the 19th. It's also in the southern U.S. "Confederate Heroes Day" where many people will be making memorial speeches to people like Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Confederate war criminal who murdered U.S. POWs because they were black and thus "escaped property". This very pleasant gentleman also was one of the founding fathers of the Ku Klux Klan.

So on the REAL MLK day they'll be celebrating the private ownership of human beings, something Dr King opposed.

What makes this relevant to your post is that one of the sponsors of the bill happens to be a member of the Heritage Foundation... the ones who are making celebrations of last year being the 150th anniversary of the START of the War to Free the Slaves and of course honoring Bedford-Forrest on MLK's birthday.

The Internet was developed with public funding all the way through and now it's to be given over to private owners... and owners who very apparently have a taste for owning human beings.

It just gets uglier and uglier each time you look under the next layer._________________He who skydive without parachute, jumps to own conclusion.

Since SOPA can "have" you for even linking to another website that
falls foul of the "puritans" views, I wanna see what sites like Farcebook
are going to do about this.
They are littered with millions of links to all sorts of sites.

Well, it now seems The President, Obama, has opposed it...
although since they used an either SOPA or eParasite [PIPA/ProtectIP etc] ii.e. 2 simultaneous alternate pieces of legislation, .... that remains a target!

Interesting piece in the Register touches on/hints at my worst fears...that it's not going away any time soon, and further hints that you'll soon go to google for royalties

Quote:

Google may slip into the role of the world's de facto royalty collecting society - and creators will have nowhere else to go but Google. Meet the New Boss: he might not look like the Old Boss, but at least you got paid sometimes

In the Panglossian worldview of Silicon Valley, everything is perfect on the internet, it's the best of all possible worlds, and any tinkering with this robs humanity of its last Utopian hope. This is a view of the world that actually owes much to religion, or the desire to recreate the certainty of religion. It's faith-based, and isn't a view grounded in reality, especially the reality of doing business. On the internet, fame may arrive quickly, but financial reward doesn't follow. It's the only area of business where this is true.

Whilst the Obama administration may have shelved it, they could make it a pseudo election issue [it's small fry in relation to the key issues which get Presidents voted in/out!]
Remember also, that no President can bind an incoming replacement to a policy he makes, once he's gone....and there is some question as to his re-election, I believe??

1. The US SOPA/PIPA is doing more to raise the awareness of why Copyright is an issue, and why it does not work. Its doing far more to raise the awareness of the things the FSF have been working for years or could ever hope to manage.

2. As it stands most of those who are against SOPA/PIPA are not actually against what its means to stand for but because its so badly written that it actually can't achieve what it sets out to achieve and does a lot of collateral damage in the mean time. (Like so much modern law of the last 30 years)

3, Anyone who moans that it only effects the US needs to think again. The EU would love to bring in similar regulations and if the US pass this, the EU will only follow. You can't say it does not effect us just because we're not in the US.

The blackout movement to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act that began with reddit and Wikipedia… spread to more than 10,000 other websites, many of which are important examples of Web entities that could be shut down without due process by SOPA-like legislation.